Chris Hayes: “A Colony in a Nation” | Talks at Google

Chris Hayes is the host of *All In with Chris Hayes* on MSNBC and an editor-at-large at *The Nation*. Ta-Nehisi Coates called his first
book, *Twilight of the Elites*, “a stunning polemic.” Hayes’ latest book, *A Colony in a Nation*, offers a revelatory and challenging new framework to understand inequality and justice in America today.

Hayes gives us a new way to frame—and advance—the national conversation on policing and democracy. He proposes that our country has fractured in two: a Colony and a Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order; fear trumps civil rights; and aggressive policing resembles occupation. How and why did Americans build a system where conditions in Ferguson and West Baltimore mirror those that sparked the American Revolution? Hayes explains how a Nation founded on justice constructed the Colony—and how it threatens our democracy.